u/songpine

>This tale was never quite set down in ink, and it has changed much in the telling, so it would be unwise to take it wholly at its word.

The Brain in the Ink, and the Fibre of Tilted Equilibrium

The tale says that long ago there lived a merchant, and that he lived in Anvil. He was a settler come from foreign parts. He had a short tongue, so it was no easy thing to place him by his speech; some said he had wandered many regions as a peddler before settling down, while others said that before he came here he had been a shipowner who sailed on his own account, but that he was utterly ruined when his vessel blew apart while carrying flammable oils.

He had no particular secrets. Though he had been a peddler, he had gone beyond Cyrodiil only in his very youth, and had taken ship but once, to import grains — pigweed. He settled in Anvil, it was said, because on a dark night the light of the lighthouse, seen from afar, had shimmered like a star. It was true enough that he took pleasure in his nightly walks out to the lighthouse, and since he was hardly the only one to settle in Anvil for such a reason, it made for a fitting enough story.

But some claimed that, seeing how he loved books, he was in truth a scholar. And indeed, his reckoning was precise, though not always to his profit.

That day, too, he had come out to take the night air. His takings had not been good of late, but his reliable partners and well-disposed customers were growing in number. Once his liquidity improved a little, his circumstances would be much the better, and so he did not trouble himself overmuch. Now, a ship that had put in around that time was selling wares unlike the usual. That ship, said to have come from the east, was selling books — a cargo one might well call exotic.

"I'm hauling off a whole library from some shining and decadent city out in a desert. Still standing, it is, though who's to say by the next time I go. Me, I was asked to do it, so I just get on with the doing."

"A city that carries off its books even it's falling — that must have been a learned one."

The merchant spoke. Books from such a place ought to be worth a look.

"Though from a quick glance, it's naught but genealogies. You know the sort."

So said the merchant as he looked the books over.

"The covers are all a single color."

"Aye. They've all manner of races there, and by some tradition or other each fixes on a color of their skin and writes its genealogies in it. And not only genealogies, so they tell me."

The merchant took one up and opened it. As he'd expected, it was in a tongue he did not know. But however he looked at it, it was not the form of any ordinary genealogy.

"Would you happen to know what this means?"

"Not I. But if it's got no title, ten to one it's a genealogy."

"I've never seen a genealogy in this form. Doesn't look to be a record of a family's line, either. These look less like letters than like signs."

"True enough. Their systems are much different from ours. It's a place where they wield mathematical and logical signs like real tools. How they went about completing their genealogies, I couldn't say."

"Then what use are these books? I can't even make them out."

"Well, then you'd do well to buy this one too. A Basic Primer of Mathematics for Children, it is — you'll want it if you mean to make sense of the others. Mind you, there's only the two, so it runs a bit dear."

The merchant was sure the fellow was working some sales trick on him. And so, as he made to move along, a few books caught his eye. One was black, and another was of many colors mixed together.

"What are these?"

"Ah, the black one's a serial — a story told in installments. The ink's just black, so you can't see the title, is all. Not finished yet, so best read it later. As for the gaudy one — the rumor goes it was made by some madman with no genealogy of his own, who set out to fashion one all his own and churned that out. He's got so many surnames his name runs on and on. Word is he's marrying into some house as a live-in son-in-law, so his name should get a bit shorter. Anyhow, it's as good as the cheapest thing here."

"The texture is quite peculiar. No paper feels quite like this."

"Believe it or not, they say they used brains. Or perhaps the brains of their own ancestors. They might have believed it held some sort of logical significance."

The merchant hesitated a moment. If he bought these books, he would have to live rather meagerly until his next payment came due. But when he let his eyes roll over them for a moment, all at once the books looked different to him, and he drew out his coin.

Back home, he regretted it for a spell, but steadied himself with the thought that new knowledge is always worth something. Perhaps, with that mathematics primer, he might translate the books and sell them, or make a dictionary of them — that would be worthwhile enough. He opened the primer and began to read.

"The world, in the end, is a thing known through equilibrium. If placing a hundred on the one side brings it into balance, then the other side, too, must be a hundred. Yet by comparing mass alone one cannot know what a thing is. To know something, one must know its nature and its relations, and this is known by setting up the equation of equilibrium. That is why the question matters. This is called Al-Zebra, named for a beast that dwells somewhere, marked with stripes of white and black…"

For an instant the merchant thought of a tiger. Was this what it meant, to bring one's mind into balance?

But what followed held little interest for him, so he skipped ahead. Then, realizing he had forgotten to look at the table of contents, he turned back to the front. And sure enough, the phrase The Interpretation of Genealogies leapt out at him.

"…A genealogy is a scale of the world. Layers. The ancestors cannot speak the answer aloud, but as an echo grows clear, as light is carved, they set forth the length of the equilibrium. The names are all held, within a joined-up context, so as to keep the order of equilibrium, and one must draw the names out until the last name and the first name become one and the same.

…

Therefore, first choose your question. Then open the book and reckon along the flow of the genealogy. If the length of the genealogy allows it, the name will be there — maybe."

The merchant closed the book. If he understood it aright, then a genealogy was a kind of long equation? But how could all the principles of creation be held within an equation already written down — one that would never change?

Half in doubt, yet thinking what harm could come of it, he wrote down a simple question, and converted it as the book had bidden him.

Will I make money?

A dry laugh escaped him. As though this were some revelation from a god of commerce.

He was a fairly sharp man, so, with the mathematics book to guide him, he carried out the reckoning by the rules without much trouble. Front to back, back to front. The pages referred to one another every which way, joined like gears turning in the void. When the reckoning stuck fast, the strange texture of the paper would sometimes lend him inspiration. And at the end of it, he arrived at an answer.

"…the ending of the name is kay."

Had it meant to say Okay? At any rate, one of the two terminal points was always of this kind.

It likely meant, more or less, yes. He thought it strange that kay — that is, okay — should signify acceptance rather than affirmation, but in any case he took it roughly for a yes.

So — was he to make money? For a mere sham of a fortune-telling book, it gave him an uncommon feeling. He pondered a while, and soon saw how much was wanting — the when, the where, the how. When he opened the mathematics book once more, it read thus:

"The heart of it is lack. Our bodies are more sensible of lack than of fullness. The motion of all things in the world is fashioned so, and that flow is carried on through names. From where, and to where, does time flow? Dusk and dawn, deduction and induction, zero and one. You who uphold the order of equilibrium, take up the scale borne up by three names. The ending is kay."

Was the mathematics book, too, perhaps a genealogy?

The merchant set to "reckoning" as to when he would come by money. The reckoning was very long, but the sharp merchant finished it around the time dawn broke. And at its end there was no kay nor anything at all. At that very moment — that moment, without the breadth of a hair's difference — he heard a knock at the door.

"My father sent me to pay back what he owed. He says to tell you he was grateful, back then."

The boy said it brightly and went off.

The end of a reckoning was always one of two things: kay, or nothing at all. There was much that was subtle in taking the nothing to mean no. Getting back money one had lent was not quite the same as making money. Would it have gone otherwise, had he charged even a little interest?

Consumed with a hunger for knowledge, he threw himself endlessly into his reckonings after turning up a few plain proofs. Did he make money by it? He did not. He came to see that though he could know whether he would make money, he could not put that knowing to use in the making of it. Suppose, for instance, he meant to foretell some trend in the market. He reckons whether the price of a good will rise, and when. And by the time he had finished the reckoning, he would find it had already come to pass — around then, or else in some moment he could not observe. In short, in most cases the reckoning of the future ran a little slower than time itself. Perhaps, had he grown more deft at mathematics, he might have done it faster — but that would have taken study.

Still, it was hard to imagine there being aught the book did not know. In its knowledge and its logic there was no lack whatsoever. The book's names felt without number. To win an answer, one had to put a question. More and more he threw himself into the search for questions. It ate away at him, and made of his body and mind a lack itself.

The plague then going round was owed to nothing other than the books. Whatever stuff they were made of, as they rotted they brought the sickness on. That great sickness blanketed the whole city, yet he paid it no mind. His books did not rot, and he had to go on making questions. People came to him and asked:

"When will the sickness stop? What must we do to cure it?"

"The surest way is to die."

People called him mad and left him.

Then, one day, he too fell to the plague. Wherever his composure had gone until then, he floundered and cried out to the gods. He asked the book to whom he must appeal in order to win his answer. That reckoning went on until the ember of his life had all but guttered out. And as he was finishing it, he saw a light. Very slowly, as though time had been drawn out long — or perhaps had halted altogether. Before him, a many-armed Mara was watching him with watery eyes.

"Child, what is it you desire?"

Her gentle voice seemed to heal every illness, but he knew. If she departed, he would die. Only death could stop the plague, and death was the one and only cure.

"Mother Mara, I desire a question. A question by which I may know the lack of this book."

In that moment, he grasped at last the question he had so longed for. But within the halted time he could not carry the reckoning on. For that name led out beyond time, and he would have had to join the beginning and the end of the names he must go on setting down. The book of genealogy was as yet too short, and he had drifted all this way in search of a question by which that book might be carried further — the Ark. And he saw that the question of whether he must go on with this had at last been given him.

The ending is kay.

— In reply to the inquiry regarding publication

This book holds too much of apocryphal reverie and ambition for it to be published. However weakened faith in the Divines may have grown, the temples of the Empire stand firm. Still, that such books once existed, and that their influence carries on to this day — that is not a thing one can flatly deny. That twenty-ninth sermon nags at me, as well. In any case, it was not so much a waste of time, so I shall not trouble to set down a report of it.

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(AI was used only to translate the text)